A new film tells the story of the song, written over 10 years with 180 versions
Hallelujah is one of the most famous songs ever written, yet a new film reveals it took Leonard Cohen 180 attempts over a decade to perfect – only for it to be rejected by his record company. Nearly 20 years went by before an animated ogre, Shrek, turned the song into a monster hit.
The makers of the documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, had unprecedented access to Cohen’s many notebooks, showing his scrawled handwriting and deletions. “We got Leonard’s ‘tacit blessing’ not long before he died in 2016,” says co-director Dan Geller.
